SPOD vs Printful — Which is the Better POD Solution?

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On this SPOD vs Printful comparability, we take an in depth have a look at two main print-on-demand options. Learn on to see how they examine in relation to product design, delivery choices, ecommerce integrations and extra…and discover out which platform is healthier for your POD enterprise.

Let’s dive into the complete comparability with a key query…

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What are SPOD and Printful?

SPOD and Printful are well-liked print-on-demand (POD) companies that allow you to create, print and promote personalised merchandise via your on-line retailer or on an ecommerce market like Amazon, eBay or Etsy.

Not like conventional printing firms, which require you to buy a big amount of things earlier than promoting them, SPOD and Printful comply with a made-to-order enterprise mannequin. Which means that merchandise are printed solely when a buyer locations an order for one in your retailer.

Each platforms supply a variety of printable merchandise that may be simply custom-made with your personal designs. Moreover, along with printing these merchandise for you, SPOD and Printful additionally deal with the packaging and supply course of. Which means that you don’t have to fret about order administration, and may focus extra on advertising your retailer and drumming up gross sales.

The method of promoting with both service typically entails three key steps:

This easy course of implies that you should utilize both product to simply create and promote distinctive merchandise with out worrying about stock administration or success logistics.

Now, let’s take a fast have a look at the background of each firms.

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Firm backgrounds

SPOD was launched in Leipzig, Germany, in 2018 as an offshoot of the Spreadshirt clothes platform (therefore the identify ‘SPOD,’ which stands for ‘Spreadshirt Print On Demand’).

SPOD merchandise are printed in 4 manufacturing services throughout the US and Europe, all of that are owned by its mother or father firm.

SPOD stories that it produces round 50K merchandise per day, amounting to nearly 10 million product shipments per yr.

(Nevertheless, SPOD’s reported manufacturing figures are literally these of the general ‘Unfold Group’ community — which incorporates 5 different manufacturers — so the precise variety of merchandise produced through the SPOD service alone might be bit lower than that).

Printful was initially based in 2013 by Latvian-born businessman Lauris Liberts, who got here up with the idea for Printful whereas working an on-demand poster firm from his lounge.

Quick ahead 10 years, and Printful has expanded considerably. It presently operates and manages 15 printing and success facilities unfold throughout 4 continents (see screenshot beneath for his or her exact places). The corporate now has a workforce of roughly 1,600 people.

Through the years, Printful has efficiently delivered a formidable 84 million gadgets — and presently delivers over 1 million merchandise per thirty days to prospects all over the world. At time of writing, Printful’s valuation stands at round $1 billion US {dollars}.

So, what are you able to promote with SPOD and Printful?

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Product ranges

SPOD and Printful each supply in depth product catalogs that embody a big selection of print merchandise. To create a custom-made model of a product on the market in your retailer, you merely choose an merchandise from both platform’s catalog and use their respective design instruments to include textual content and pictures (extra on the designing course of in a second).

Each firms supply merchandise throughout broadly comparable classes, together with:

You may browse Printful products here, or take a look at SPOD products here.

Printful has the bigger variety of merchandise accessible, with a set of 335+ customizable merchandise on supply in comparison with SPOD’s 230 or so.

Because of this, you’ll discover fairly a number of additional products accessible from Printful that SPOD doesn’t supply. A few of these embody:

Now, the product catalogs in each SPOD and Printful are very straightforward to browse. Each provide you with well-organized product class filters that make it easier to discover the assorted gadgets on supply.

I really feel that Printful’s catalog has a little bit of an edge from a usability perspective, nevertheless. It’s because not like SPOD it includes a useful search field, which makes it very fast to discover a product you’d prefer to customise.

(Printful additionally enables you to browse merchandise by product producer, which is a useful choice to have if you wish to persist with a producer whose merchandise have beforehand proved well-liked together with your buyer base).

You may take a look at Printful’s full product catalog here.

So, whereas each platforms present reasonably-stocked and well-presented product ranges, Printful takes the win here, due to its bigger choice of merchandise and extra fully-featured product catalog instrument.

Subsequent, let’s learn the way simply SPOD and Printful will let you create customized merchandise.

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Product design

I discovered designing customized merchandise in SPOD and Printful to be extremely easy, with each platforms offering actually easy-to-use design instruments. These allow you to add your personal art work, insert textual content and customise your merchandise through a drag and drop editor.

As you would possibly anticipate, each platforms allow you to add photographs to your designs in JPG and PNG codecs, however SPOD goes a bit additional in relation to file codecs — not like Printful, it lets customers add Adobe Illustrator recordsdata and CDR vector recordsdata to create designs with too.

Nevertheless, in relation to file measurement limits, Printful is the extra beneficiant platform — the utmost file measurement you should utilize in your designs is 200MB, which compares very positively with SPOD’s 10MB file measurement restrict.

When it comes to built-in design belongings, each instruments offer you libraries of inventory graphics together with icons, shapes and backgrounds.

At first look, SPOD is the extra beneficiant of the 2 platforms with regard to free belongings — its graphics library comprises round 50,000 belongings in complete, whereas Printful limits you to 25,000 items of free clip artwork and different graphics.

Nevertheless, Printful offers you the choice so as to add an enormous vary of premium inventory belongings (photographs, vector graphics and patterns) to your design. These typically price $1 per use every, which means that you simply’ll be charged a $1 license price each time you promote a product that features one.

Printful’s premium inventory images (pictured above) are price a specific point out. These are offered by the Getty Picture Library, which supplies Printful customers entry to a staggering 80+ million images, all of which may be built-in right into a design.

Sadly, SPOD’s product designer doesn’t include any inventory images in any respect, so its customers should supply inventory imagery in different third-party picture libraries and add them manually to their designs.

Printful additionally wins in relation to textual content formatting capabilities. For a begin, it provides you with considerably extra font choices than SPOD — there are over 700 font households accessible in Printful in comparison with round 60 or so in SPOD.

Moreover, Printful’s designer offers you extra enhancing performance when working with textual content. It enables you to use curved textual content, create textual content outlines and apply textual content drop shadow results — none of those design choices can be found in SPOD.

One other side of Printful’s design maker that I’m a fan of is its layer management characteristic. This can be a instrument that you simply’ll usually discover in graphic design packages like Photoshop or Canva — it enables you to management the stacking order of your design parts by dragging layers above or beneath one another in a management panel beside the design canvas. This characteristic is especially helpful if in case you have lots of overlapping parts in your design.

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Branding on merchandise and packaging

The extent to which you’ll current your prospects with a robust, constant model presence to your POD business is a crucial consideration when selecting a print-on-demand provider.

So how do SPOD and Printful examine in relation to branding choices?

Properly, with SPOD, the branding choices are fairly primary — you may add your model emblem to the sleeves of clothes merchandise, and use colours that adhere to your model tips.

Printful goes a bit additional right here, as a result of (relying on the product concerned) it additionally enables you to add inside and out of doors branded labels to clothes merchandise.

However what about branding your product packaging?

Properly, SPOD doesn’t supply the choice so as to add your model to its packaging supplies in any respect. It packages your merchandise in ‘white-label’ mailers, bins and packing tubes, however doesn’t allow you to model these in any approach.

Equally, Printful doesn’t allow you to add your model or emblem to its personal packaging both. Nevertheless, it does provide the choice to ship your personal branded packaging to Printful to ship merchandise in. This comes with extra prices for storage (beginning at $0.70 per cubic foot) and choosing charges ($0.50 per mailer), nevertheless it does provide you with a option to model your items.

Along with its branded packaging possibility, Printful gives one other branding characteristic that you simply don’t get with SPOD. You may embody varied ‘customized packaging inserts’ together with your packed Printful merchandise for a small price.

These inserts can embody flyers, coupons, enterprise playing cards, branded stickers, postcards, and thank-you playing cards.

The charges for including these things to your Printful packages are as follows:

You may simply deal with all branding choices within the ‘branding presets’ part of your Printful dashboard. Right here, you may apply branding settings all through your complete retailer or choose distinctive branding combos for chosen merchandise in your Printful account.

Total, it’s truthful to say that in relation to product design instruments and branding choices, Printful wins.

Subsequent, let’s discuss delivery.

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Transport and supply

The very first thing to contemplate when evaluating SPOD and Printful’s delivery companies is every firm’s manufacturing time — the size of time it takes to print and bundle your merchandise in order that it is able to be delivered.

SPOD wins right here: over 95% of its orders are able to be shipped inside 48 hours of an order being positioned in your retailer.

Against this, Printful stories that almost all orders are prepared for delivery inside 3 days or fewer, which is a fairly respectable common turnaround time in comparison with many different POD suppliers — however not as fast as SPOD.

Subsequent, how a lot do SPOD and Printful cost for delivery?

SPOD and Printful function alternative ways of charging for the delivery to your items.

SPOD fees for delivery based mostly on the worth of your items, with totally different delivery charges in place relying on the nation or state your items are being despatched to.

Printful applies delivery charges based mostly on product sort — there’s one set of charges for t-shirts, one other for baggage, one other for house decor gadgets and so forth. There are round 22 product classes in all, every with totally different charges relying in your buyer’s location.

(Helpfully, each firms present delivery calculators that can assist you work out delivery prices. You should use SPOD’s shipping calculator here and Printful’s shipping calculator here).

See the desk beneath for a pattern price comparability of delivery fees from each firms for well-liked POD merchandise.

	SPOD	Printful
Normal t-shirt	$4.77	$4.69
Baseball hat	$4.77	$3.99
Sweatshirt	$5.99	$8.49
Giant poster	$5.99	$5.99

As you may see from the above examples, Printful is cheaper for delivery t-shirts and hats; SPOD is cheaper for delivery sweatshirts; and within the wall artwork class, pricing is equivalent in each platforms.

Nevertheless, it must be identified that as a result of SPOD calculates delivery based mostly on order worth fairly than product class, delivery prices could also be significantly greater than the figures quoted above — this can depend upon the price of the bottom product.

For instance, a SPOD ‘Bella + Canvas’ Unisex sweatshirt with a base worth of $30.10 would price $9.87 to ship to the US, nearly $4 greater than the common SPOD sweatshirt delivery worth within the comparability desk above (and, certainly, $1.38 greater than delivery the identical actual product in Printful).

Now, in relation to how lengthy it takes to ship items to your prospects, SPOD is certainly the faster of the 2 platforms.

That is partly as a consequence of its sooner manufacturing instances, but additionally as a result of SPOD — not like Printful — gives a ‘Premium’ and ‘Categorical’ delivery possibility on all merchandise.

Nevertheless, the charges your buyer pays for sooner delivery with SPOD aren’t low cost. For instance, it prices round $21 to specific ship a t-shirt to the US (relying on the state). In Europe, SPOD’s categorical delivery is much more costly — quick delivery for a sweatshirt usually prices an eye-watering €34 ($38.50).

Nonetheless, SPOD will get a thumbs up for offering retailer house owners with a option to get their wares to prospects as rapidly as potential.

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Integrations

Printful gives a much larger range of integrations with ecommerce platforms than SPOD.

Printful gives a complete of 23 direct integrations.

At time of writing, the complete record of companies that may be related to Printful is as follows:

SPOD integrations with ecommerce platforms are a lot fewer in quantity. There are simply 4 direct integrations accessible, and these are just for on-line retailer builders, not on-line marketplaces.

SPOD solely integrates instantly with:

There’s a workaround nevertheless for getting SPOD to speak to on-line marketplaces. This entails connecting it to an automation instrument known as ‘Order Desk.’

Order Desk provides an extra 50 or so marketplaces to the combination for SPOD sellers together with essential ones like Etsy, eBay, Greatest Purchase and Amazon.

Nevertheless, utilizing the Order Desk integration with SPOD is kind of costly. The charges for doing so vary from $20 per thirty days (plus $0.25 per-order transaction charges) on the Order Desk ‘Starter’ plan as much as $125 per thirty days (plus $0.05 per-order transaction charges) for the ‘Plus’ plan.

The video beneath explains the (pretty difficult!) course of for connecting SPOD merchandise to the Etsy market through the Order Desk platform.

However what about person response to the accessible integrations?

To get an concept of this, let’s check out buyer suggestions for each instruments from WooCommerce and Shopify retailer house owners.

WooCommerce customers price each SPOD 3 out of 5 and Printful 2.5 out of 5 (it’s price noting that there aren’t too many opinions of SPOD by WooCommerce customers, nevertheless).

	SPOD	Printful
Shopify app retailer	4.1 stars (721 opinions)	4.7 stars (6,233 opinions)
WooCommerce / WordPress plugin listing	3 (8 opinions)	2.5 stars (87 opinions)

In the case of Shopify customers, Printful comes out on prime within the buyer satisfaction stakes, receiving a wonderful 4.7 out of 5 score (based mostly on 6.200+ opinions). This compares positively to a still-respectable 4.1 stars for SPOD (based mostly on 700+ opinions).

Total it’s truthful to say that Printful has a transparent edge in relation to integrations. It gives way more integrations than SPOD and it consists of direct integrations with ecommerce marketplaces out of the field.

Moreover, Shopify retailers — arguably essentially the most vital userbase within the POD business — give Printful a reasonably decisive scores victory over SPOD.

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SPOD vs Printful pricing

Not like some competing POD platforms comparable to Printify, there are not any month-to-month platform charges to fret about whenever you use SPOD or Printful. Each instruments allow you to arrange an account, create merchandise and record them on an ecommerce retailer totally without cost.

Which means that the pricing variations for each instruments are to be present in product costs.

So, let’s take a fast have a look at each firm’s beginning costs (within the US) for some well-liked POD classes.

	SPOD	Printful
Males’s t-shirts	Beginning at $8.18	Beginning at $9.25
Unisex sweatshirts	Beginning at $21.34	Beginning at $18.50
Hats	Beginning at $10.85	Beginning at $12.95
Mugs	Beginning at $8.11	Beginning at $7.95
Tote luggage	Beginning at $7.19	Beginning at $13.95

As you may see from the above desk, each instruments cost comparable costs for these merchandise — SPOD is cheaper in some circumstances (the place males’s t-shirts, hats and tote luggage are involved) and Printful is cheaper in others (i.e., sweatshirts, mugs and cellphone circumstances).

The entire above costs embody including a printed design to at least one space of every product — if you wish to print on extra areas, each platforms cost you roughly $5 per extra space.

However beginning costs are just one a part of the pricing story; it’s price remembering that the bottom product in each instruments is probably not precisely the identical or, certainly, of the identical high quality. In different phrases, you’re not essentially evaluating like with like right here.

So let’s examine SPOD and Printful costs for gadgets that contain the identical base product from the identical producer.

Listed below are three examples taken from each firm’s product catalogs:

	SPOD	Printful
Bella + Canvas 3001 T-shirt	$12.66	$11.25
Bella + Canva Tri-blend 3413 T-shirt	$18.14	$17.75
Gildan sweatshirt 18600	$27.15	$23.95

Curiously, Printful costs work out 2% to 13% cheaper than SPOD for base merchandise from the Gildan and Bella + Canva producers — and I discovered this to be the case for a number of different equivalent gadgets which might be supplied by each platforms.

One other key good thing about utilizing Printful over SPOD in relation to pricing is its ‘Printful memberships’ low cost scheme. This offers Printful customers entry to discounted pricing throughout Printful’s full product catalog.

Printful’s low cost program is tiered by annual gross sales quantity: retailers who promote greater than $12,000 yearly qualify for ‘Progress’ membership reductions, and people surpassing $60,000 in gross sales entry ‘Enterprise’ membership reductions. Retailers not assembly the $12,000 threshold can select to pay a $24.99 month-to-month price to obtain ‘Progress’ membership reductions.

The reductions accessible via Printful’s membership scheme are pretty beneficiant. The ‘Progress’ membership plan offers you entry to as much as 20% off direct-to-garment merchandise and as much as 30% off different product classes, whereas ‘Enterprise’ members can avail of as much as 22% off direct-to-garment merchandise and as much as 33% off different product classes.

(Each membership plans additionally present reductions on Printful product branding too.)

SPOD doesn’t present an identical possibility for customers to entry discounted product pricing.

Total, I might argue that product pricing in SPOD and Printful is usually affordable and kind of according to the prices concerned with promoting on competing POD platforms comparable to Gooten, Spring and Printify.

Nevertheless, as a result of it fees much less for a similar merchandise than SPOD, and on prime of that gives entry to giant reductions through its memberships scheme, it’s a clear win for Printful in the pricing category.

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Buyer help

SPOD and Printful supply customers a number of methods to contact their buyer help groups. You may contact Printful through e-mail and dwell chat; e-mail and cellphone help is offered by SPOD.

The supply of cellphone help for SPOD is important — lots of ecommerce instruments don’t present it.

Printful has an edge nevertheless in relation to the provision of buyer help — its dwell chat service is accessible 24/7 throughout all areas.

Against this, SPOD buyer help is just accessible Monday to Friday on the following instances:

A key factor price flagging up about SPOD customer support is that you may solely contact the client help workforce within the area your SPOD account is registered for. So, in case your retailer is registered within the US, you may’t name the European help line for assist (and vice versa).

Along with the in-person help offered, each Printful and SPOD give customers entry to ‘self-serve’ assist facilities. These assist portals cowl all of the fundamentals together with creating merchandise, organising integrations and account administration.

It’s truthful to say although that Printful’s assist middle is the extra complete of the 2; and it consists of lots of easy-to-follow video guides, whereas SPOD’s assist materials is essentially text-based.

One other edge Printful’s assist middle has over SPOD pertains to multilingual help — it‘s accessible in 6 languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, French and German), whereas SPOD’s assist supplies are solely accessible in English.

Printful customers may avail of some free print-on-demand programs through the ‘Printful Academy’ pages within the Printful assist middle. Upon completion of those quick programs, customers obtain factors that may be exchanged for varied goodies and perks — for instance, free Printful merchandise, low cost coupons and pattern orders.

(These seem within the ‘Printful Challenges’ part of a Printful account).

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SPOD vs Printful: conclusion

Total, Printful is the winner in a SPOD vs Printful comparability. It gives sellers with considerably higher performance than SPOD in a number of key print-on-demand areas, particularly the place designing merchandise, making use of customized manufacturers and accessing discounted pricing are involved. Printful additionally boasts a considerably bigger vary of integrations with prime ecommerce platforms and marketplaces than SPOD, which means that it’s a a lot simpler and extra versatile instrument to promote POD merchandise with.

Specifically, Printful is the a lot better selection in case you plan to promote print-on-demand merchandise to a world viewers. Not like SPOD, Printful doesn’t drive you to pick a geographic area for product manufacturing or purchaser market: all Printful retailers can promote their merchandise worldwide, and their prospects don’t face giant delivery charges (as a result of Printful routinely routes orders to be printed and fulfilled at services in the identical area as the top buyer).

SPOD does have an edge over Printful in a few areas, nevertheless. Specifically, its sooner manufacturing and delivery instances are price highlighting as key wins. With most of its merchandise being printed and packed inside 48 hours, SPOD can get gadgets to prospects extra rapidly than Printful (in truth, it has one of many quickest turnaround instances in the entire POD business).

One other side of SPOD that can enchantment to some customers is the way it fees for delivery. Not like most POD firms — together with Printful — SPOD bases delivery charges on ‘order worth’, which is arguably a much less advanced method than Printful’s ‘per class’ method to delivery charges.

However usually, it’s exhausting to not conclude that Printful is the general winner on this shootout.

I’ll wrap up with a abstract of the important thing execs and cons of each of those print-on-demand platforms — and why you would possibly need to use one over the opposite. When you’ve got any ideas or questions on these two POD platforms, please do leave them in the comments section beneath.

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SPOD vs Printful — execs and cons abstract

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Options to SPOD and Printful

There are fairly a number of options to SPOD and Printful for making a print-on-demand retailer. Let’s check out among the key ones.

Printify

Printify is without doubt one of the strongest contenders to SPOD and Printful, particularly the place product catalog measurement is anxious: it offers you entry to an enormous choice of 900+ customizable merchandise.

Not like SPOD and Printful, Printify makes use of a big community of third-party print firms to print orders, and this could typically result in sooner delivery for patrons and decrease prices for retailers.

You may study extra about how Printify stacks up towards Printful in our detailed Printful vs Printify comparison.

Apliiq

Apliiq is a print-on-demand firm specializing in premium attire merchandise.

Like Printful, Apliiq gives a variety of customization choices, together with branded labels, clothes tags, and embroidered patches. It additionally gives distinctive product customization, like the flexibility to design the inside lining of a hoodie or add pockets, patches and extra to your clothes.

Really helpful for these trying to begin a vogue model with a deal with design and high quality, APliiq gives wholesale reductions, product high quality assurance companies, and extra advantages like customized woven labels.

You may study extra about Apliiq and its ‘personal labeled’ hoodie choices within the video beneath.

Spring (now Teespring)

Spring is a print-on-demand firm aimed firmly at social media content material creators. To that finish, it gives you with integrations for Instagram, Twitch, Linktree, OnlyFans and Youtube — making it an fascinating POD resolution for creators on these platforms with a captive viewers of potential patrons on their channel. You may learn more about Spring in our full Printful vs Spring comparison article here.

Canva

Another choice for beginning a POD enterprise is to make use of the design app Canva. This allows you to create and print 43 several types of top quality merchandise.

Not like different companies talked about earlier, Canva is a general-purpose design instrument fairly than a devoted POD resolution.

Nevertheless, it gives a extra strong design interface than most POD platforms, which features a a lot wide selection of enhancing instruments (brushes, photo-editors, AI design options, and extra). Consequently, the print merchandise you may create with it may well look higher than these created with some POD options.

Moreover, Canva gives an unlimited assortment of inventory photographs and graphics that may be integrated simply into your designs.

If you happen to’re excited about studying extra about Canva, take a look at our comprehensive Canva review or learn our Canva Pro vs Free article.

Alternatively, you may watch our video information, ‘What’s Canva?’ (beneath), for a fast overview of the platform.

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